Tuesday, July 5, 2016

"Based on a True Story"

Recently, I've been up to my chin in Season 5 of Babylon 5 for the upcoming Dreams Given Form project. Season 5 is now drafted and will be off to our intrepid editor in the next day or two - Ensley and I always write, then breathe, and then check each other's drafts before we send the first draft off to our editor. Since Season 5 serves as the denouement in the structure of JMS' television novel, it's quieter in places than earlier seasons (and truth be told, there's one storyline I'm not a gigantic fan of, but I'll grudgingly agree that it's there for a solid reason). But it also contains some gut-punches of episodes. So it's been quite a ride. The movies and Crusade are next for me.

But we've had a little down time, and we used it to (of course!) check out movies for the C19TV show we host Meet Me at the Movies. (We're available through streaming, remember! Click here for details!) On top of spending a few mindless evening devouring Rifftraxon Hulu - with their help, I finally made it all the way through the genuinely godawful Plan 9 from Outer Space and we also caught the extraordinary weird early films Maniac and the so-inaccurate-it's-hilarious Reefer Madness - we also caught two first-run films that seem to have nothing in common and then I realized that they both purport to be based on true stories.

And aside from that, Free State of Jones and The Conjuring 2 have nothing - NOTHING - in common. To begin with, I liked Free State.

Set in Mississippi during the American Civil War and the Reconstruction period, Free State is the story of Newton Knight, a dirt farmer conscripted into serving as a medic for the Confederacy. The problem is that Knight sees the entire conflict as "a rich man's war and a poor man's fight." Like a massive number of Southern soldiers, Knight owns no slaves and doesn't much care for the laws passed by the Confederacy that allowed rich men who did to ride out the war well away from the front lines. He eventually deserts and goes home to his farm, where he discovers that the poor farmers he grew up with are barely scraping by, since most of their crops, hogs, and other livestock are being "requisitioned" by the Confederacy to feed the troops. Few men remain behind, so it's women and thin children being starved and scared. Unable to live quietly - deserters aren't popular with any army - Knight eventually becomes the de facto commander of an army of deserters who might not exactly be Union sympathizers, but they surely hate the Confederacy's high-handedness. That's an attitude that only grows after the war ends and things remain bad, bad, bad.

There's a bit of the "white savior" problem in Free State, and Matthew McConaughey's Knight is terribly enlightened for his time. Then again, I've often said, "Don't get your history from movies." You can easily fact-check Free State (try here or here, for example!) So, take it with a grain of salt. But I quite enjoyed it - even the storyline of the 1948 case of Davis Knight that's interspersed in the film kept my interest. Race is a problem in this country and it has been for a long, long time. That doesn't mean it must always be that way, but Free State gives you an inkling of just how high those walls we're trying to tear down were originally built.

The Conjuring 2, on the other hand, claims to be based on the "true story" of Ed and Lorraine Warren ghost-hunting in England. Similar to the first film - and Annabelle, which tells the story of a creepy haunted doll (the real one is a Raggedy Ann doll, which you just can't make scary) - such claims are hogwash. The Warrens are hucksters and flim-flam artists of the first order and the liberties taken with this film continue that trend. Their Website is laughably bad - misspellings and other errors that I would never let a student get by with adorn its pages, which look to have been designed in the mid-90s. While I'll admit to being open to the idea that some places/things are certainly creepy and that "there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy," the Warrens are distilled nonsense. (Plus, there's no actual "conjuring," a problem I had with the first movie as well.)

Whatever, scary movies don't have to be true. What really got me about Conjuring 2 was how well it reinforces the notion that horror movies tend to be incredibly conservative in their messages. Think about it - the girl who enjoys sex usually gets killed first (and often in a way that can be read as a substitute for penetration), and the virgin is usually the one to survive. In this film, so much comes down to "single motherhood is bad." (As is showing skin - Lorraine Warren's nightgowns and other costumes are practically Victorian.) The film has some worthy jump scares, but I'm still unsure why it's rated R. Language isn't terrible, no nudity, and no graphic violence. Plenty scary for young ones, though, so be careful on that front.

To sum up - Babylon 5 continues to impress, Rifftrax will cure what ails ya, Free State of Jones will make you re-think a few assumptions about the Civil War, and Conjuring 2 will make you re-think keeping that chair that came with the house.

Yes, trust me - I know that the Breaking Bad finale was last night - fear not, thoughts on that are coming for "Walter White Wednesday...

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Look, I'm flattered if you read something here and like it enough to want to want to rip it off. Or even if you dislike it enough to want to rip it apart. In either case, the content of this blog is mine - I'm responsible for it and you are not to use it without first obtaining permission from me.

Copyright. It's not just a good idea. It's the law.

It really is - see Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the United States Constitution.

K. Dale Koontz

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Who?

K. Dale Koontz may have watched too much television as a child. She learned to count via Sesame Street and first learned that genres could cross-pollinate through M*A*S*H. When she discovered Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the die was cast. In 2008, McFarland published her book Faith and Choice in the Work of Joss Whedon which focused on themes such as redemption, choice, and consequences in Whedon's work up to that point. (She's fairly sure Volume 2 could be written to include Dr. Horrible, Dollhouse, and The Avengers.) She is a founding member of the Whedon Studies Association (a great group of people, but don't mention Twilight. Just sayin'). She has presented original work on the Rossum Corporation in Dollhouse, Kitty Pryde, and Japanese anime. In 2014, she and co-author Ensley F. Guffey worked with ECW Press to publish the critically-acclaimed Wanna Cook? The Complete, Unofficial Companion to Breaking Bad. Her most recent project was to team again with Ensley and ECW to publish A Dream Given Form, which is the only guide to all the canonical works in the Babylon 5 universe. That book is currently available for preorder and will be released in September of 2017. Dale is available for speaking engagements and only occasionally uses puppets in her presentations.

What?

I have long been interested in storytelling - how we do it, why we do it, and what happens when we mix things up. This interest might be the result of being born and raised in the American South, a region that has long celebrated the involved story over the quick answer. Television - the good stuff, anyway - does this brilliantly. Far from being film's red-headed tacky cousin, good TV lets characters and relationships build slowly and often mixes up genres, so horror is next door to humor and fantasy rubs shoulders with procedurals. This blog focuses on both the "good stuff" being broadcast that catches my fancy (with a special emphasis on Babylon 5, since that's the book that's in the process of being written right now) as well as film. The films are usually new releases being watched for TV19's weekly Meet Me at the Movies, although I reserve the right to veer off into classics and under-appreciated gems as well. Older posts cover what my introduction to film class was up to - currently, I'm not teaching that course, but who knows what the future may hold.